Luxemburgism

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish-German Marxist, an opponent of the First World War, and a founder of the Spartacus League. She was killed in Berlin in January 1919 after the Spartacist uprising. The texts the name rests on include Reform or Revolution (1900), against Eduard Bernstein's revisionism; The Mass Strike (1906); The Accumulation of Capital (1913); and The Russian Revolution, written in 1918 and published in 1922. That last pamphlet defended the social aim of the revolution and attacked the closing of political freedom. A sentence from it is still quoted: freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.

As later writers used the word, the current keeps three refusals. It refuses a reformism that treats socialism as a speech and settles for managing capitalism. It refuses a party that substitutes itself for the working class and treats dissent as treason. It treats the mass strike, and the initiative of workers, rather than a conspiracy of leaders, as the way a revolution stays democratic. It is internationalist: Luxemburg opposed the war, and she was more skeptical than Lenin of national self-determination as a socialist path. The word is not one membership card. Groups that have used it disagree about organization.

The criticism belongs in the record. The January 1919 rising is widely judged to have been attempted without the support or the preparation it needed, and Luxemburg herself had doubts about the timing even as she joined it. An appeal to spontaneity can understate how much organization a strike or a council needs. The freedom she demanded inside the revolution did not, in 1919, become a working constitution. This page is not a recommendation of the uprising, and it is not a reason to skip the books. The link below is this site's sketch of one person. It is not a definition of luxemburgism, and it is not your score.

Economy runs from Collectivize to Privatize. Luxemburgism is socialist: it wants the means of production taken out of private capital, so the interest sits toward Collectivize. Control, from Planned to Laissez-faire, does not capture the argument she actually had, which was about who holds the plan. A party-state command and a workers' council can both be called planning. She attacked the first in the name of the second. This test has no axis for that distinction. A high planning score is not luxemburgism.

Representation runs from Democratic to Autocratic. The 1918 pamphlet is on the democratic side of a socialist revolution: elections, a press, and freedom for opponents, against a dictatorship that claims to speak for the class. That is not liberal parliamentarism as the finished form of politics. Reform or Revolution had already rejected parliament as a substitute for social ownership. A person can value both texts and still be matched to marxism, revolutionary socialism, or democratic socialism. Intervention runs from Internationalist to Nationalist. Opposition to the 1914 war, and skepticism about nationalist roads, sit toward Internationalist. Military is not pacifism. She opposed an imperialist war and did not renounce force in a revolution.

Culture, religion, immigration, trade, and technology are not fixed by the texts of 1900–1918. Later readers have extended the current onto those axes. The extension is theirs. The 38 reference positions include marxism, revolutionary socialism, leninism, and social democracy. Luxemburgism is not among them. Leninism on this site is the contrast she wrote against, not a synonym. Social democracy is the reformist pole Reform or Revolution attacked, and it remains a separate result the test can return.